Carlos Fuentes - Terra Nostra

“The silence that surrounds us [señor caballero, she calls you, her head resting upon your knees] is the mask of silence: its person.”

Her hands claw at the air. You offer her the gourd filled with pulque and she drinks without argument, vitally gross. Again she brushes your lips with her fingers. Pulque dribbles down her quivering chin. You drink what her mouth offers you. You hear her murmuring and feel you are again a child in your mother’s lap, far from war, far from death; she tells you that you are young and handsome, a child, sleep, sleep, rest, rest; such clear eyes, such soft cheeks, such moist lips. She strokes your armpits. You raise your arms and cradle your head in your clasped hands; she toys with the moist hair on your chest, the excited nipples of a mischievous child.

“I have managed to deceive you. Every night, when you are not watching me, I have been writing you a letter: My beloved, I think of you constantly from this land filled with the memories of our best years … Here everything speaks to me of you; your Lake Como, so dear to you, spreads before my eyes in all its azure serenity, and everything seems the same as it was before; except that you are there, so far away, so far … I know how to read at night, señor caballero.”

Laughing, her finger counts your ribs, and creeps into your navel, is moistened by the sweat and dirt accumulated there, faint testimony that for days you have not descended to the river, there is no time, everything one does is indispensable, eating, sleeping, waking, we bathe together in the river, but no one looks at the others, soldiers and camp followers, our bodies are also our uniform, we must win our ultimate battle or we shall have no reason to continue living, the vegetation on the shore hides us, our bodies are the color of the deep grasses swaying on the bed of the tropical river. The belly is a smooth stone in the depths of the placid river. She caresses you, and murmurs. Body hair is moss on the stones that lie in the depths of the turbulent river.

“Air and light. Those of us who still cultivate the deception of the senses require them. Ideas flower, but quickly wither, recollections are lost, sentiments are inconstant. Smell, touch, hearing, sight, and taste are the only sure proofs of our existence and of the reflected reality of the world. You believe that. Do not deny it.”

Scorpius, sweet purple scorpion, raceme of moist mud. She caresses you, clasps you, cups your weight.

“We have left our homes and we must pay the price of such prodigious behavior. Exile is marvelous homage to our origins.”

Her toothless mouth descends upon your belly.

“You believe that time always advances. That all is future. You want a future; you cannot imagine yourself without it. You do not want to provide any opportunity to those of us who require that time disintegrate and then retrace its steps until it come to the privileged moment of love and there, only there, stop forever.”

Her tongue slides along the burning smoothness of your penis; toothless gums imprison you; everything is viscous, dank, open; she touches the live fascine of nerves.

“It is sad that you will not live as long as I; a great pity that you cannot penetrate my dreams and see me as I see myself, eternally prostrated at the foot of tombs, eternally present at the death of Kings, insanely wandering through the galleries of palaces yet to be constructed, mad, yes, and drunk with grief before the loss that only the combination of rank and madness can support. I see myself, dream of myself, touch myself, wandering, from century to century, from castle to castle, from crypt to crypt, mother of all Kings, wife of all Kings, surviving all, finally shut up in a castle in the midst of rain and misty grasslands, weeping another death befallen in sunny lands, the death of another Prince of our degenerate blood; I see myself dry and stooped, tiny and trembling as a sparrow, toothless, whispering into indifferent ears: ‘Do not forget the last Prince, and let God grant us a sad but not odious memory…’”

You spread your legs for her mouth.

“I said to him: do not dishonor yourself, always be the Emperor, make them bow before you; a monarch is a good shepherd, a president is a mercenary; a republic is a stepmother, a monarchy a mother. You and I will be the mother and father of these people, I said to you as we were climbing from the sea, from Veracruz, toward the plateau, toward Mexico City, seeing frontiers of nopal cactus, naked and swollen-bellied children, dark impassive women wrapped in rebozos; stiff, mute men. We loved them so, didn’t we, Maxl? Do you remember, Maxl, when we hid behind the curtains at Miramar and watched how your brother’s soldiers beat and shot the rebellious Italians; when we allowed them in Trieste to whip a pregnant woman until punishment turned into a blood bath. They told me that we killed ninety thousand Mexicans. But we were their mother and father. They had no name. Only you and I had a name in this anonymous land. But now, dear Maxl, now that I imagine you alone and besieged, far away, dead, I would like to shout: in the name of those we murdered without moving a finger, in the name of those who died while we danced in Miramar and Chapultepec, for the pity we did not have for you, may you have pity on us! Punish our crimes with your pity. Let your mercy be our torture. Castigate and pierce our bodies with the intolerable humiliation of forgiveness. Do not grant us martyrdom. We do not deserve it. We do not deserve it. Are we victims of Mexico, Maxl, you and I and all our ancestors, all the kings of Flemish and Austrian and Spanish blood who first conquered this Indian land and, finally, in this place exhausted their royal line? No, in the end we are all the children of Mexico, because only by hatred can one measure love for Mexico, and only Mexico’s vengeance is measure of its love. Bells are tolling on the hill. Can you hear them, Maxl? Can you not understand that they are attempting to overcome the roar of the Mexican sun, the weeping of guns, the sighs of prayers, and the trembling of that dry land? Give me back the body of my beloved.”

Silence pursued. Silence personified. Spurting, bitter milk; death rattles. The Old Woman’s mouth holds you, saliva and semen blend, and now she allows the mingled liquids to return from her lips toward their origin, the exhausted testicles breathing with the rhythm of a caged animal: you are bared to the sky.

“There is no possible exchange, my son. A true gift does not admit equal recompense; an authentic offering rises above all comparison and all price. They gave us an empire; could we repay that with simple death, with simple madness? I, poor wretch, returned to seek what I had lost. Again I plunged into these accursed jungles. I let myself be led by the map of the new world, the map of arrows and insects that allows us to abandon the known world and venture where no one has any claim on us, to the heart of the virgin forest, to the pyramid itself.”

You lie beside the adobe wall, panting beneath the sun.

“It was for nought. My place was already taken. Another woman stood on the steps of the pyramid. An Indian woman. She was adorned with necklaces of jade and turquoise, and she clasped a dagger of flint in her hand. I recognized her; it was she who when I disembarked from the Novara offered me this gift: this feather mask. Her feet trod the porous stone of the stairway and I could see the wounds of irons and chains on her ankles. I knew she was waiting for someone — perhaps a different man — to lead him a second time. To repeat the eternal journey of defeats and victories, of jungle and sea, plateau and volcano. I pitied her. I returned the map to her. Now I must reconstruct it if I wish to escape from here, to forget, to return to the penumbra that awaits me … the castle in the mists…”